Lost in September

by Kathleen Winter

  But Madame Blanchard knew I loved her.

  I remind myself, here on this tiled floor that emanates a pong of Javex through the liver odour, that this is what matters.

  “Where…is there…Is it the Anglican cemetery?”

  “She is not in a cemetery.” Madame Thunay-Dufresne places a large brown envelope in my hand. “Here are her papers. We proceeded according to most of her wishes. I’ll have to telephone the funeral service and ask them to courier the box. I’m afraid we’ll have to transfer the courier charge to you. We’ve done all the paperwork and the cheque is in here along with the other papers. Really, we should not have had to deal with these extras. If you had been here earlier, we could have saved some of her knick-knacks for you. As it is, we have had to send most of it to Fripe-Prix Renaissance. You could have made better arrangements. If everybody did as you have done, we’d barely stay in business.”

  She clacks down the hall. Suzette plugs in the plastic kettle and stirs Nescafé and coffee whitener into a cup for me. Dabs my face with a cloth, cool and damp, removing the bloody encrustation.

  “I’m sorry about your loss.” She looks down the hall to make sure it’s empty, then reaches in the back of a drawer to extract a small packet. “Here. I saved this.”

  In it lies the smallest dormouse from Madame Blanchard’s collection, the one I used to hold while she read me British stories as a child. Is it even a dormouse? I become unsure. I have called Madame Blanchard’s figurines dormice since I was little: but really, this one is some sort of unrecognizable meadow-creature with a longish nose. Might it be a tiny platypus? It has a tender aspect, and as it rests in my hand I wonder if Madame Blanchard asked Suzette to keep it for me.

  I sit on a bollard in the parking lot and wait for the courier. He has to go in and have Madame Thunay-Dufresne sign for the box containing the remains of Madame Blanchard. The funeral home calls it an urn, but it’s nothing more than a box made of waxed cardboard. It reminds me of the takeout Chinese food containers Sophie brings to the tent on Friday nights after she gets paid.

  As I hold her remains I reflect that being with Madame Blanchard, even in her last years, always held some comfort for me.

  Now her little house by the sea will change even more.

  The thought of that house terrifies me all the way back downtown on the train with Madame Blanchard’s carton on my knee. I know the house became unlike its old self eleven years ago, when Madame Blanchard had to move out of it. Already, then, its roof groaned toward the stones and pineapple-weed. But now her ashes make it irrevocable: I can no longer pretend I might repair that house, or repair to any time before it fell derelict. The house and Madame Blanchard fell apart together, leaving me no shield against reliving war in Technicolor, all night, every day…alone in that house sagging into its field of rhubarb by our crescent beach and taking me down with it….Until, as August bled into September, I ventured down to the beach and met Sophie.

  —

  AS THE TRAIN CREAKS INTO Bonaventure Station I feel hungry—and am ashamed of the hunger. Why, when one is bereaved, do the animal humiliations persist? I feel starved, and want potatoes.

  Wolfe’s first potato was at his mother’s house when he came back from Portsmouth at thirteen, thin, seasick and ashamed to have abandoned Cartagena, his very first campaign. I remember Betty made him a plate of magical whip—potato fluffed with milk. He’d never had it before. She sprinkled nutmeg on it. It revived him in a way he had not known food could do.

  Is that truly what happened?

  Even if Sophie makes fun, even if my memory is unsure, I can say with authority, if only from the times Madame Blanchard cooked potatoes for me as I came home from school, that a bowl of mashed potatoes with a square of butter swimming in the fork-tine furrows on top is restorative.

  So yes, I am sure James Wolfe asked Betty to make this dish whenever he felt low. Later, when he returned from battle, she made him a nice dish with potatoes thin-sliced with gold edges in a pot, but it was his French cook, François, who transformed potatoes into medicine.

  “Don’t tell me,” François said, eyeing Wolfe. I hear François saying it: “I see by your colour: Je le sais exactement.”

  François concocted a red-hot soufflé that was not so much nourishment as revivifying inspiration. He made it when…I could hold down no other food, the worst time being when I returned from the torment of our aborted assault on that windswept island off Rochefort, not long before I sailed for Quebec. If François had not been present at Blackheath then, and had not made his potato soufflé, or if a craze for turnips or parsnips had overtaken the country instead of everyone going mad over potatoes, I do not know that my victory at Quebec could have happened.

  François’s potatoes steamed as I lifted their cover. The steam was blue and curled with swirling hoops over the chocolate hues of our dining room with its window looking out on my mother’s garden that had a coat of new snow. I was glad she had gone to Bath.

  It meant I did not have to pretend robust humour. I was close to collapse. I found it shameful to return to England fresh from our army’s cowardice at Rochefort and had returned to Blackheath to keep away from the glare and questioning. I wanted to bring down my fever with diachylum and sink my foot in the warm fur of my dogs and hide for a month or two….

  RIGHT OUTSIDE BONAVENTURE STATION IS downtown Montreal’s Le Petit Québec, where the poutine is cheap but good and does not have the artificial red gravy they give you at La Belle Province. At Le Petit Québec they give you squeaky cheese curds in gravy that’s brown and thick.

  I set Madame Blanchard carefully on the Formica table.

  The server has red hair like mine, subdued by a hair net. His nametag says Augustine. So the French here still name their sons after Catholic saints! Part of me wishes that with such a name, the youth might have been destined for a more auspicious job.

  A rack near the door has yesterday’s paper languishing on its bottom shelf. I sift through it as I eat, looking to see if anything of importance has happened in the world, but someone has torn half the pages out. Still, what remains is hardly inspiring.

  If I had to name my greatest disappointment regarding New French Britain, I might have to say it’s the inconsequential drivel I read in papers purportedly published by the country’s learned set.

  On page four runs a list of every detour one must take to avoid construction on the Champlain Bridge:

  Stay clear of 15 south from the Turcot Interchange from Highway 132. Stick to designated routes on Atwater and de La Vérendrye Boulevard to access the Bonaventure Expressway during installation of two modular trusses upstream of the bridge…

  Below this item a restaurant reviewer outlines the merits of scalloped veal over the Salisbury steak at his favourite diner. Things have not changed an iota from the coffeehouse drivel I used to read in London at Osinda’s or the Cocoa Tree….

  It’s the same with what I overhear in the streets. I eavesdrop on Montreal hoping I might hear its civilians discuss the latest findings in astronomy, or new perspectives on ancient philosophy, but they bleat the same small-talk I could neither abide nor understand in London of 1752: sports, weather, insipid flotsam sent on the wind by the latest political scandal—details petty and trivial and numerous as Sophie’s froth-flecks on her painted walrus’s sea, ephemeral. You’d think it all the most weighted precious stones, the way people bleat on. This fills me with chagrin and always has done.

  On torn page fourteen, half a face resembles Harold’s—but I know it’s just me wishing I could find him again. I miss his cheerful yellow clothes. His was a motherly understanding. In the absence of both Henrietta and Madame Blanchard, might not one’s best mother be a man? The bit of headline remaining under the photograph says Man Apprehended After Exp….I recall Harold said he’d caused a small avalanche climbing Mont Royal, and wonder for a moment if he might have graduated to explosions.

  Dejected, I walk to Rue Laurier and try poutine with lam
b and pomegranate: then to Crescent Street for a mountain of sausage and mash. None of this is cheap, but the cheque for seven hundred dollars in Madame Blanchard’s paperwork means I can afford it. I feel surprised the nursing home hasn’t gulped every last cent of Madame Blanchard’s account, but I suppose seven hundred is no big deal to Gisele Thunay-Dufresne.

  Now I’m too stuffed to visit the place I found last year, where they grill coins of potato sliced so thin you can see through them. Instead I head to Dépanneur Tracy to buy Sophie’s favourite potato crisps, a type made by Miss Vickie, or so the package proclaims.

  I’m headed back up the Main when I realize I have Sophie’s crisps and I have the brown envelope from the nursing home with my cheque in it and Madame Blanchard’s papers, but I no longer have the box that holds her ashes. I’ve left her with my Styrofoam plate and plastic cutlery and greasy paper napkin littering the table at Le Petit Québec.

  Has Saint Augustine saved Madame Blanchard?

  I race back down.

  “Augustine left,” says a lad, dark-haired and painfully thin. “I just replaced him for the three o’clock shift.”

  The place is quiet after the midday rush and the lad takes a moment to open the trash bins and poke around with a spatula then a pair of tongs and even a broom. He wants to help but can’t see my box in the bin: perhaps the bin has been emptied into one of the six Dumpsters out back?

  I cannot bring myself to tell this boy, whose nametag bears the name of Jesus’ earthly father, that my box contained beloved human remains.

  “It’s all right,” I lie. “I’m fine. It’s—thank you.”

  Outside I gulp a breath of rain and diesel. A pigeon cocks its head beside a puddle.

  “The box did not really contain Madame Blanchard,” I tell it.

  Pigeons have eyes the colour of beer bottles. They have red, wrinkled, rubbery toes, three pointing forward and one in retreat.

  “Her soul had already departed….”

  Her soul and her body have both departed: Three weeks ago, Madame Blanchard became smoke that floated above the city and now travels beyond it over the trees and fields and rivers and other pastoral features that ring Montreal. She has gone up into the air and become cloud.

  The pigeon flies up into the letter O of Jean Coutu drugstore and settles comfortably among the pigeon-dissuading spikes someone has installed.

  I have been unforgivably negligent—my heart thumps at the bottom of its cage—but strictly speaking I have not spoiled Madame Blanchard’s flight out of this life. That flight began with her death, or perhaps it began with the burning of her remains. The ashes, I tell myself, were secondary.

  Still, I feel so ashamed I can’t return to the tent before stopping in at Les Ancêtres on the corner. I no longer drink to medicate my sorrows as a rule, but it takes me several pints and a fair amount of hard stuff to numb the self-recrimination.

  FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 8.

  NIGHT.

  Mont Royal. Montreal, Quebec

  IN THE NIGHT, I WAKEN Sophie and beg her to return me to my mother.

  “It’s simple hypnosis, Jimmy Bee,” she says, not unsympathetically this time. “I’ve told you how to do it yourself.”

  “C’mon, Soph. Without you I can’t even find the doors.”

  I shut my eyes. Following Sophie’s directions, I will descend hills and stairs until I reach the series of doors, all different colours. I’ll choose one and walk through it, and slowly she will have me look up to see one of my ancestors. I regard Sophie’s procedure as auxiliary to my own memories—when she puts me under I’m as if concealed on a theatrical stage, unnoticed by the actors.

  “You’re descending the stairs,” she says. “Down another flight, then another. Descend the very last flight and go out the back, down the bank to the courtyard, down through the passageway with its closed doors, all the colours. Now…which one?”

  I still smell our tent canvas and Mont Royal’s night air, but I see the doors.

  “Green.”

  “Open it….So…where are you?”

  “Snuggled in a soft, woollen cloak. My mother’s face is looking down at me.”

  “Which mother?”

  “My mama.”

  “Which mama?”

  “Don’t!”

  “How big is your hand?”

  “What?…My hand?”

  “Raise it between your face and your mother’s.”

  “Tiny. My hand is tiny….Am I a baby?”

  “I don’t know….Can you understand the woman?”

  “I know how she feels. It comes through her eyes.”

  “What does?”

  “She’s sick of waiting. She waited a long time for me. My father’s no good—he’s old and he’s not a good companion. She waited for me to be born, and here I am, but I’m not—” I feel unbearably sad.

  “You’re not what?”

  “I’m not what she wanted….”

  My mother’s loneliness is too deep for me to mend. I am just one baby. I look around to see if there are other babies who might help.

  There are flowers outside my blanket, yellow in the grass, but no other babies. My mother’s eyes are wet like big plums. I grow wary of the plums.

  “What’s happening?” Sophie’s voice reaches me.

  “She’s only pretending to love me….Really she’d like to go away, far from her baby. And she does. She goes inside the house. I’m still outside. She gets smaller through the glass, which I touch. I dislike how cold it is, and hard. I see her in the shadows doing solitary things.”

  “Like what?”

  “Snipping dead leaves off her begonia. Writing letters. Pretending she doesn’t know I’m here.”

  Silence. I can feel Sophie waiting.

  “I’m shivering. The whole day goes past. When my mother comes back she says, ‘See? You learned. I told you you’d learn.’ ”

  “Have you learned?” asks Sophie.

  “I don’t know!”

  My mother did this often.

  My father never knew, and Betty wasn’t with us yet.

  My mother would leave me all day and then come back and whisper, “You’re not mine.” I tried to tell her I belonged to her and no one else—I cried with all my heart: I am yours! And she said, “Very soon you will not care about pleasing me, so I am not going to care about pleasing you. So there—live as your father’s soldier-son, you little-red-dimpled not-mine.”

  Has Sophie fallen asleep? Half the time when she gives me an ancestral consultation or a hypnosis treatment she’s the one who relaxes—I suspect she hypnotizes herself. I open my eyes.

  Little-red-dimpled not-mine cannot fall asleep. He has wandered Montreal all day in his red coat and here he is tonight, still little and red, and once again he belongs to no one.

  I turn to Sophie’s painted walrus and whisper, “I need real help.”

  Sometimes when Sophie is pretending to be asleep, she will throw her voice like a ventriloquist and make the walrus on the tent wall speak.

  “Before I died, I had hoped,” I whisper, “that man as a species was moving—inching, to be sure, but progressing nevertheless—toward some greater purpose….”

  “A greater porpoise,” mocks the walrus.

  “I know I’m slight,” I tell it. “I’m thin and insubstantial, I know that, but I wanted to do something big for England.”

  “Hmm…slight, yes. I see a parasitic whelk, a very tiny one, though it seems to believe in its heart that it is quite big.”

  Rain hits the tent and damp filters into the sleeping bag.

  “I tried to secure new territory, a home for Britain’s genius and evolution!”

  “Right.”

  “I mean—you know religion’s a delusion I never entertained—but I’m talking about the humanitarian soul of a nation. I hoped boys like Gus and Joe at Le Petit Québec—boys who became soldiers with me to gain a pay of mere crusts and breeches—I really thought the New World was supposed to give
them a chance at a parcel of ground.”

  “Ground you figured nobody else was using.”

  “I gave ordinary boys a chance only privileged Englishmen knew before….I believed a seed in these youths could, in the New World I won for them, become glorious as Milton, or a second Cromwell….But the rich squash them here, just like they did at home! Geography transforms itself—or I thought it would—into psychological space, into freedom for the mind. The point of my efforts was that ordinary Englishmen might possess this land and flourish on it….”

  “Excuse me,” mutters the walrus, “while I regurgitate this clam breakfast into your tricorne.”

  “Instead, I find the old, weary bondage. I never claimed to be altruistic. I knew if we didn’t annex the New World, the bottom would fall out of England’s economy and ruin us all.”

  “No more cucumber sandwiches.”

  “But surely, a secondary good coming from our empire should have been that a youth having any spark might thrive here. Yet the poor toil here unexalted as ever. As for the well-provided, their banal crowing echoes the clang of trussell on planchet under every New World moment: a relentless strike of metal into coin.”

  “I’m sorry, I’m half-asleep….Did you say something about the Second Coming?”

  I give up. Rain patters on the tent.

  Rain understands me. I welcome it in this place where all softness or questioning…all poetry or intelligence, has drained into the ground.

  17 Watermelons

  SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 9.

  MORNING.

  The Riverbank. Montreal, Quebec

  THIS MORNING, CIVILIANS STROLL the riverbank in rumpled pants—they saunter past me now. A man who tells me he’s from British Columbia nods at me on the way to his daily swim near the sewage outlet, possessions bundled on his handlebars. He’s one of few men around here with hair longer than mine.

  “The water’s great,” he hollers.

  “I know it.”

  Various dogs leave their owners to sniff my trousers. What a small but all-infusing joy it gives me to rub their forehead indentations. There is no denying my September pilgrimages have been a lonely business.